Our family is growing!

We are not expecting, at least not in the traditional sense, but we are making space in our home and hearts to become a party of five.

Through months of prayer and seeking, we have made the decision to begin using our family and home as a place to minister to little ones in the foster care system.

Over 400,000 kids are in the foster care system in our country right now and I recently learned here in Kent County some kids have to live in a group shelter because there simply is not a bed within a home for them to sleep in. Ugh. That breaks my heart. That breaks our Heavenly Father’s heart and we know He has called our family into this challenging yet beautiful ministry.

Nick and I feel complete peace and unity in this decision, which is a HUGE answer to lots of prayers. Some of you reading this know the journey we have been on–going through the start of an international adoption program and then domestic infant adoption program and now here we are — doing foster care with the goal to help families reunite (yet with an openness in our hearts to adopt if/when a need arises to do so).

We went from not having any interest in foster care to now being eager and passionate about fostering. We look forward to sharing the love of Christ through foster care–both to the child we take in and to their biological parent(s).

So far we have attended our orientation and had our first meeting with our caseworker. Tomorrow we will get our finger prints done and then begins in-depth interviews for each of us with the caseworker. We also have 33 more hours of training to complete and lots of things to do in our home like making sure all medicines (including OTC meds) are locked up.

The licensing process takes 3-6 months and we are getting licensed to care for the 0-2 age range. Most of the steps involved in getting licensed are not too challenging and do not cost us any money. However, we do have one hurdle and that involves our basement. Our basement is the main play area for our kids and apparently we need to install an egress window downstairs in order for our basement to be a licensed “livable” area to use in our home.

We are actively saving money for this now that it has been brought to our attention and we have a contractor coming to give us a quote tonight. Unfortunately, we are in a tight place financially (just being fully honest), so this may not be something we can pay for right away. If that’s the case, we can create a makeshift play area upstairs for awhile–it would just be nice to keep toys/kid chaos downstairs amidst a big life change that will be happening.

If you are interested in helping us, we are collecting money raised through pop cans to help cover the cost of this egress window expense. We are looking at somewhere between 3-5K for this project and so far we have raised a bit over $250 through bottles & cans! If you are local and want to drop cans off or have us pick them up, we are happy to do that. Or if you want to send any bottles & cans money our way via PayPal or Venmo we would be so grateful!

We also ask for prayers for our family that God would unite us through this and help us to have wisdom, discernment and huge amounts of love, patience and energy to do all He has planned for us.

Thank you for joining us on this foster care journey!

Love,

The Theobald fam